IN an odd synchronicity, as the pervasiveness of the Internet and mass media homogenizes mass culture, blogs have become small independent voices, like blades of grass poking up through cracks in cement. They are gasps for air and identity in a city known from the outside as lacking a discernible sense of place.
"L.A. people, like most people, hunger for interaction and community and are relying more heavily on the blogosphere than those who live in places where other forms of interaction are more readily available," says Joshua Meyrowitz, a media studies professor at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and author of "No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior."
Meyrowitz cited his own local social crossroads, the Durham Marketplace grocery store, "where one almost always runs into friends, neighbors, co-workers, and where students and profs interact informally off campus." Small, compact towns and even large, dense urban centers like New York City have similar spots, where neighbors routinely cross paths. But in a scattered, highly mobile place like Los Angeles, such interactions are less common, he said.
For Angelenos, blogs can represent a virtual replacement for the neighborhood coffee shop, Meyrowitz said. Blogging, in fact, could be a symptom of Los Angeles' oft-cited lack of a discernible soul. Blogs can also expose the intricacies of individual lives to the outside world, presenting a more sympathetic view of who lives in a place without necessarily changing external perceptions of a city.
"The L.A. blogging, in my view, improves the image of people who live in L.A., without necessarily improving the impression of L.A. as a physical location," says Meyrowitz, author of the recent essay "The Rise of Glocality: New Senses of Place and Identity in the Global Village," included in the book "A Sense of Place: The Global and the Local in Mobile Communication," edited by Kristof Nyiri.
"But people are part of the social landscape, so there is some improvement in image.... We all still think of L.A. as 'the overstuffed land of shallow beauty and naked ambition.' But maybe a few more years of blogging will help."
